Main navigation

Incremental Builds are Critical for Continuous Builds

Incremental Builds are Critical for Fast Continuous Builds.

Incremental builds are important for managing continuous builds for continuous delivery. Handing over a release from dev to prod must be easy and automated. The production side of the house cannot always be expert in every team’s application, there can be just too many in large organizations. So one way to keep it simple is to perform incremental deploys when at all possible. The key to incremental deploys is an incremental build. One hand feeds the other. In the Make world, or more specially ClearMake, this was called Build Avoidance. It seems that the art of avoiding building objects has all been lost even though it is critical to agile developers and the DevOps process.

Break Down Waterfall Barriers with Incremental Builds

The Build itself must become incremental to fully support a development process where incremental changes are encouraged. If not, your Continuous Integration process is impeded by a slow Build process written to support a waterfall methodology. Hence, a slow compile creating all binaries each time – the “big bang” approach. When using OpenMake Meister for powering Build, the default Build is an incremental Build. Nothing special is required to execute a build using Build Avoidance. Your Build will automatically be executed on an incremental basis. Therefore, you are reducing your Build times down from hours to minutes.

Reduced Build Times for Continuous Build

Incremental Builds substantially decrease Build times by avoiding the execution of Build steps that are not needed. This is a critical component of lean methodologies such as Agile Unified Process (Agile UP), Scrum, and Rhythm (Unified Build Infrastructure). So, If you are looking for ways to improve Build times, the use of incremental Build will allow you to reach your goal.

Incremental Builds determine all dependent relationships in the Build regardless of language. For Java, an incremental Build determines the dependency of all .jar, .war and .ear files. This also includes jar files that are used by other jar files and their dependent java source files. Similarly, in more traditional languages such as C/C++ or COBOL, dependency relationships are discovered for all included headers, copybooks, etc.

Note: If you are using Meister and choose to always execute Builds using a “clean all” approach, pass the following parameters to the om process when executing your Builds:

-a or clean all

If the clean all parameter is not passed, your Build will be performed in the most efficient manner using BuildAvoidance.